More wonder, more insight, more expression, more joy! R&D on tools for thought, with a focus on memory, reading, and attention. Currently working on @pico.
San Francisco, CA
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Tools for thought are a beautiful idea—inventions which can “change the thought patterns of an entire civilization.” But that’s a 30 year old quote. Why are they so hard to make? @michael_nielsen and I try to answer that question and suggest paths forward: numinous.productions/ttft
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Some notes on @thesundaylight, a sort of… artificial skylight?
It feels good to spend the day in daylight. But that doesn’t happen when I’m working inside. Especially in the winter. So, for years, I’ve used super-bright LEDs while I work. They quite noticeably improve my energy and mood.
ALT Standing under Sunday, a strange new kind of light.
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Playing with a strange pen. The ink stretches backwards into the past and forwards into possible futures. The two sides make a strange loop: the future ink influences how I draw, altering the future's past ink…
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Software interfaces undervalue peripheral vision! (a thread)
My physical space is full of subtle cues. Books I read or bought most recently are lying out. Papers are lying in stacks on my desk, roughly arranged by their relationships.
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In honor of SciHub being suspended on Twitter, I’ll share this convenient view-on-SciHub bookmarklet, which you certainly shouldn't use.
javascript:location.href=location.href.replace(location.hostname,location.hostname+'.sci-hub.se').replace(%22https%22,%22http%22)
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📣 Announcing an experimental new tool for thought 🚨
@michael_nielsen and I have been wondering: what happens if we take powerful ideas from cognitive science and deeply integrate them into explanations? Our first experiment in a new "mnemonic" medium: quantum.country/qcvc
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This college student has been live-streaming his daily study sessions for the past year, 12 hours straight, every day: piped.video/c/JamesScholz/fe…
He’s not narrating or providing funny commentary like a typical Twitch streamer. It’s just: you watch him study, very intently!
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Papert wrote this 45 years ago. The internet didn’t exist—0 laptops had been sold. Could’ve been written last week.
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📣 New essay distilling one strand of some ongoing work✨
I argue that books lack a functioning model of how people learn—instead, they're (accidentally, invisibly) built around a model that's plainly false. Plus some early models for what to do about it. andymatuschak.org/books/
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This question's gauche, but: given the prevalence of $400k++ comp packages for ~30-year-olds in Big Tech, why aren't there lots more "gentle[wo]man scholars"? i.e. people quitting to do non-remunerative creative projects
I can think of some, but shouldn't there be thousands?
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I've noticed that consciousness recedes when I'm deep in a coding phase, many back-to-back days in flow. My mind narrows to tunnel-vision, fixated on the software and its issues. My sense of self shrinks; non-code ideas cease to arise; I get less curious; writing yields little.
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In my work with adult learners, conversation often focuses on materials, tools, and techniques—but the main bottleneck is often trouble actually siting down to study consistently. Learners usually feel sheepish about this and prescribe themselves "more discipline".
But often I think they're hesitating for good reasons which should be resolved, not steamrolled (see image, from a recent essay). What other reasons am I missing?
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Have been experimenting with this unusual Dasung portable e-ink display for park working sessions. It's surprisingly responsive—plenty good enough for writing, coding, studying. HDMI driven, weighs about 1.5lbs, sits in front of my normal display (& uses much less power, ofc).
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The screenshot shortcut (Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4) is convenient for quickly measuring screen elements. I only just learned you can hold Space to *shift* the box. So useful for comparisons!
(Also Opt to resize symmetrically, Shift to resize along one axis)
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My selfish take on Twitter: the Discourse could stand to care a lot less, on the margin, about “free speech” and “bias in the algorithm” and a lot more about discovering all the amazing ways a public water cooler could be improved for more joy, more discovery, more connection etc
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I say with confidence as a former UIKit author: React's model for the UI layer is vastly better than UIKit's. React Native is a *huge* deal.
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U Chicago offers a four-year discussion based course on “The Great Books”, available online to anyone. I just finished year one, and I’d definitely recommend it! graham.uchicago.edu/programs…
Some notes:
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Mathpix claims to offer PDF -> LaTeX / Markdown conversion. I was skeptical… but the results are quite amazing! Does anyone know if this implements a published model? Or is it all proprietary?
mathpix.com
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I was surprised by some very odd typographic choices in Tufte’s new book. Halfway through, he explains: “Systematic regularity of text paragraphs is universally inconvenient for readers… Idiosyncratic paragraphs assist memory and retrieval” A fascinating idea—I’m not sure!
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It's interesting being able to "flip back" a few pages with much less disruption to one's sense of "place."
Also interesting: "I remember where that detail was on the page" -> "I remember where that page was in space"
(text is legible in headset, tho not in the exported video)
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New essay: "Exorcising myself of the Primer"
The Diamond Age's "Primer" has long been edtech's most canonical shared vision. I feel the field is haunted by it. It's wrong in many important ways—but we haven't articulated a better one, so we cling to it. I want to transcend it.
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A provocation I'm liking: most piano students have a 1:1 tutor; few math students (say, undergrads majoring in math) have a 1:1 tutor.
Lots of work is predicated on the latter being intractable ("must find some way to make group instruction as good as 1:1!"). Why the difference?
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🎉 New essay: andymatuschak.org/prompts
This essay catalogues techniques and mental models for writing good spaced repetition prompts—not just to remember stuff but as a method for creating understanding.
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I love the way this inverts the typical angle on productivity. "Motivation is a skill"… but not in a making-bullet-lists or use-a-pomodoro sense; rather, the skill lies in getting better at amplifying the quiet voice that's telling you what you find most meaningful.
Motivation is a skill. Wanting things is not something you can just “do” beyond lollipop level at age 3. You have to learn to zoom in on the thing that vaguely attracts you, with enough precision that the motivational feedback loop kicks in. Like a starter motor.
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A few favorite related refs:
1. Axler's preface in "Linear Algebra Done Right", suggesting par at 1 page/hour
2. Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" (contra Learn C++ in 24 Hours)
# on shortification of "learning"
There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.
So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.
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When people ask where I work, I sometimes describe myself as “feral”. It’s a joke…but also a real aspiration. Good things happen when I try hard to chase my sense of excitement, ignoring impulses to produce legible outcomes. This essay really captures it: palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/…
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Visiting the Hoover Dam feels to me like visiting a rift into an alternate timeline—one in which we attempt enormous, absurd, starry-eyed projects… and achieve them, under budget and years ahead of schedule!
I’d love to better understand the forces which made that possible.
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Following up: several people mentioned the original 1987 Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which I'd not read. It's not a comprehensive primer on interface design, but it is an extraordinary read—a huge amount of detail on *why* things are as they are. And a great bibliography!
Why are there no "standard texts" on designing software interfaces? (or tell me I'm wrong?)
If you want to learn to *build* software, there are excellent and complete texts on the subject. It's not just a tech-vs-art thing: there are standard texts on type, drawing, color, etc.
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It's fun to see my notes browsing design make its way into lots of commercial products. People have asked whether it bothers me—no! I want this! My rough theory of change for my work is: invent a thing; try very hard to give it away; let others deal with the pains of production.
In 0.16.2 Insider release, we introduced Stacked Tabs!
You can now switch any tab group in your workspace into a tab stack. Tab stacks provide an alternative way to view your tabs, reminiscent of the Sliding Panes plugin.
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No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
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Quite a striking result. Given a camera mounted in one’s glasses, pointed at one’s face, this system can synthesize the view of a camera in *front* of you, pointed at you. You could video chat while walking around without holding anything in front of you. piped.video/watch?v=atzPvW95…
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Why are there no "standard texts" on designing software interfaces? (or tell me I'm wrong?)
If you want to learn to *build* software, there are excellent and complete texts on the subject. It's not just a tech-vs-art thing: there are standard texts on type, drawing, color, etc.
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hahaha you want to make a portable link to a passage in an ebook??? foolish child—that requires technology we can't yet DREAM of
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Alan Kay once said: "Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must only work on great ideas, not good ones." Inspiring, and exasperating. I've been grappling with it for years, on and off.
Held as a lens, it really has pushed me to work on projects that have felt a lot more meaningful, long-term. But it's also corrosive: it crowds out playful curiosity, tinkering, etc. Alan's own history is full of that. It's also misleading: you can't "only work on great ideas" because you can't know ahead of time which seedlings will become great.
In what senses is the quote true or useful? One thing I like about it is that it takes for granted that the listener (me!) can work on great ideas, make a great contribution. Most work doesn't even try. But it's worth trying. The sentiment makes me want to set my sights higher. It's useful sometimes as a sort of pump: is there a deeper, more powerful version of this idea I'm thinking about?
Most recently, I thought about it when looking at this photo of me at age 3 playing with Kid Pix. So free! No need for the art to be great! The opposite of what Alan's talking about, and yet some of my happiest childhood memories.
Anyway. How do you grapple with this quote?
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It's surprisingly difficult to find a PDF of the 1987 edition online, so here you go: andymatuschak.org/files/pape…
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My new talk, "How Might We Learn?", is now available as an skimmable / scannable hybrid video-script-image confection.
If you prefer to read, or if you (like me) tend to lose track of links to long YouTube videos, this is for you! andymatuschak.org/hmwl/index…
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There are surprisingly few serious "web books"! I don't even mean "fancy new media books"—just: written primarily for and read primarily on the web.
Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours!
* Butterick's Practical Typography: practicaltypography.com
(more 👇)
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There's a kind of debugging I call "flailing"—a desperate, theory-less "jiggling the handle" one can stumble into after extended failure. Found myself there today on hour 3 of JS build system BS. In such situations I find Pirsig's treatise on "gumption traps" a good antidote.
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📝🎨💥 Let's go beyond multiple-choice questions and right-vs-wrong feedback! How might we make great open-ended writing/drawing activities online? @nsbarr @farrarscott @johnisrude @mayli & I've been exploring that for 18mo; thrilled to share our findings: early.khanacademy.org/open-e…
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I’m running an internal workshop series for devs on being better partners to designers, building better UIs. Handout from today’s session:
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🎥 New talk: "How Might We Learn?"
A (proto-?)vision talk of sorts—a first attempt at a broader picture of the future of learning I want to create, particularly given developments in AI.
Thanks to @HaijunXia and @ProfHollan for hosting me! 🙇♂️
(YT link in thread if you prefer)
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Yesterday a friend called, quite frustrated to be very stuck on a project. My impulse was to find ways to unstick him, but I realized: we absolutely have to cultivate the ability to be content while totally stuck! If we're doing interesting work, we'll be stuck most of our lives!
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📣✨ Introducing Latticework, new work with @MatthewWSiu. 🕸️✍️
It aims to help with making sense of messy piles of unstructured documents. The key idea is unifying annotation (direct reaction in context) w/ freeform text-editing (for fluid sensemaking).
matthewsiu.com/Latticework
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Parker collected many videos of people talking through doing tasks involving difficult tacit knowledge.
Curious: have any of you found videos like this helpful? Which ones, in what ways? Trying to understand this medium better.
I spent 60+ hours finding 78 tacit knowledge videos.
After going viral last year, my LW post is the Schelling point for sharing the type of vid Richard is talking about.
If curious, check out the vids and pls share videos of this type in the comments!
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Today is launch day for @museapphq, a very interesting new fluid thinking canvas for iPad. I've really enjoyed following the development of @MuseAppHQ from the early flurry of papers at @inkandswitch.
Many unusual ideas about incremental creative work encoded in this interface!
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We oil our butcher block countertop every few months. Over ~8 years, it's soaked up ~12 liters of mineral oil. That's a lot of volume! Where does it go?
It can't evaporate. I can't imagine it's all sitting inside the wood. Does it all just rub off on food and during cleaning? What's happening when it "dries out" and then accepts another half liter of oil?
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A friend asks: after a hiatus of a few months, how to apologize to an Anki deck? It feels "angry" now! I wrote:
I totally get you. Here's the thing: the Anki deck has been mistreated—but not by you!
The Anki designers accidentally put the wrong clothes on the poor Anki deck. They dressed it up as an inbox. When you don't attend to an inbox, it just keeps piling higher and higher.
But I think the Anki deck wants to be treated more like meditation, or a nourishing meal. If you miss a week of meditation sessions, you don't meditate 8 times as long next time. If you fast for a few days, you don't find yourself wanting to consume 4,000 calories in your next meal.
Concretely, I suggest: try setting the maximum cards/day to 50 (at a typical average of 6s/card, this is 5m). When you finish, you're done! You did your meditation session and/or ate your nourishing meal! If you want to do another later that day, that's fine; you can do that if you want.
Unless your deck is enormous, if you do 50/day (~5m), you'll catch up eventually. Really, it's totally fine if it takes weeks! It's just the hyperliteral Anki interface that makes it feel not fine.
Also: taking a break actually gives you an opportunity. You have fresh perspective on your deck. Probably now it's easier to sense that you don't care about a bunch of those cards. So, give yourself the freedom—or, better, encouragement!—to suspend/delete any cards that stimulate a disinterested response.
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This story viscerally conveys a strange asymmetry in modern creative work: a person like Max can be doing work which produces civilizational-level benefits affecting many millions of people… and yet bad-faith behavior by a *single person* can seriously drain gumption.
This thread is more personal than most of the things I share here, but I’m at my limit with Jason Hickel.
I want to explain why I dislike him so much and how we got here.
This is a personal story over several years so it’ll take a bit of time.
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If you've only read "modern" HIGs, I definitely recommend reading the 1987 edition! It's *very* different. It is amusingly difficult to imagine this passage in a contemporary Apple text.
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Curious about "topics the internet left behind," where there's tons of deep knowledge in old books, but most everything online's shallow & Yahoo Answers-like. Serious piano practice technique is a good example; culinary composition is another.
Why do some topics end up that way?
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📣 New "mnemonic essay" on quantum computation with @michael_nielsen 🚨
How can any procedure possibly search a list in O(√N) time? Find out here—and remember what you've learned almost effortlessly through our integrated spaced repetition system.
quantum.country/search
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📣 Launching a research fellowship: work with me on a research project of mutual interest; get six months of funding and mentorship.
Details here (apply by Nov 25): notes.andymatuschak.org/Rese…
ALT DALL-E-generated image of a young person holding a book with magic coming out of it, surrounded by clouds.
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I recently streamed a 5.5hr session of me building a prototype (for patrons). I've done a few of these now—I'm interested in how livestreams might help convey tacit knowledge, particularly in domains which are normally apprenticeship-oriented.
Some observations on the medium:
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Great paper: a brain-computer interface lets a patient "type" at ~90 char/min (avg smartphone typing: ~110c/m) by imagining themselves handwriting biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… ht @brainonsilicon
Even better—they used a ~simple ML arch and very little training data! Low-hanging fruit?
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Even in think-y land, so much depends on instinct, "taste" for problems/approaches, an aesthetic of ideas. Frank Oppenheimer points out that play is so important because it's one of the only ways adults hone their sense of taste. (from Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens)
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One unexpectedly great application for Apple Watch: stochastic self-sampling. e.g. here's my mental energy level throughout the day.
Can use notification actions to respond in one tap, so it's low-friction enough for 10+ prompts per day; and works when away from computer.
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An unintuitive secret of reading books on computers: reading PDFs with original typesetting is much better than reading ebooks, which treat text like a 4chan shitposter and have impoverished reading software.
But… where to get the PDFs?! A survey & suggestions for future work:
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✨ New essay with @michael_nielsen, illustrated by @Mappletons: numinous.productions/timeful…
We've previously written about a "mnemonic medium," which helps you remember what you read. Here we explore a different angle, extending a book in time to help it connect to lived experience.
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Still spinning from this idea in @nayafia's "Making in Public": that when the economics of consumption don't work—e.g. because the product is a public good—a more viable model may exist around the economics of *production*. That is: when might production *be* the product?
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It's a trope that readers wildly overestimate the cognitive value of highlighting, but I have a lot of sympathy for highlighting as a purely expressive gesture. It's a (feeble) avenue for reacting or participating in the face of a static, immutable block of someone-else's-text.
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Goofy noticing: if I watch a lecture video at the speed that feels most comfortable (usually 2-3x) and pause intermittently to write notes + SRS prompts, the total time consumed is roughly equal to the 1x lecture running time (but I’m much more engaged).
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Some initial rough notes on the interface paradigms of Vision Pro / visionOS: notes.andymatuschak.org/Visi…
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The primary “unit” in such systems is a single highlight or note, but that’s not how I think. Marginalia have fuzzy boundaries, and I often think of a page’s markings as a single unit.
LiquidText is a lovely counterexample: it works hard to display annotations in context.
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I tried a bunch of things, but gave up and became socially brittle. Or, well, socially disagreeable—means I invite people out for afternoon strolls after gracious declining their late-night event invites.
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What are the best textbooks (or comprehensive primers) which are freely available online? Ideally as web content, not as PDF.
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One odd thing about software engineering culture is that almost all instructional material is introductory. It's rare to find screencasts aimed at deep problems experts encounter in production systems. Gary's videos are a glorious exception—I'm really thrilled that he's back!
New YouTube channel! The first video is "End-to-End TypeScript: Database, Backend, API, and Frontend". It shows our end-to-end type guarantees from the backend database all the way to the React props. Demoed live using @exec_prog's codebase as the example. piped.video/watch?v=GrnBXhsr…
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📢 I wrote a comparative analysis of strategies for my team on sharing code across iOS and Android (and web). Enjoy!
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Orbit is open-source: github.com/andymatuschak/orb…
I did this because my crowdfunding now feels increasingly solid. Patrons provide >2/3 of an NSF CAREER grant (a common "starter" grant in science). Made a (public) video reflecting on CAREER vs crowdfunding: patreon.com/posts/crowdfunde…
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Some people collect stamps; I’ve been collecting unusual applications of spaced repetition systems.
I realized today that I haven’t yet solicited the power of Twitter here! What weird use cases have you found?
My running list: notes.andymatuschak.org/zrs5…
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One reason books are hard is: readers run all the feedback loops. "Did I really get that? Should I flip back?" This demands attention to both the content and also the meta.
We interleave prose and lightweight spaced repetition to take some of that work off the reader's plate.
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Recently served on a jury for the first time (assault with a deadly weapon, etc). Some surprises:
1. I knew that conviction requires unanimity. But acquittal requires unanimity! We couldn't agree; the result is a mistrial; the DA can re-try the case if they want.
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Argdown is an interesting Markdown syntax for constructing argument maps. argdown.org
It has some unusual non-linear writing features: e.g. you can give statements/arguments titles and elsewhere refer to them as supporting/undercutting others.
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🎉 New essay reflecting on my experiences so far as an "independent researcher"—ill-defined though that term is.
andymatuschak.org/2020
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Today I relished Unflattening by @Nsousanis—a dissertation-as-comic on the power of graphic communication to delinearize multifaceted topics, convey nuance, balance the analytical.
It's a great instance of self-exemplifying media: using comics to present complex ideas on comics.
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Nothing quite like the delusional optimism of hoarding a zillion PDFs before travel, so many PDFs that it would take much longer to read them than the total hours of the trip.
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Game designers have a strong culture of producing serious, insightful talks about their work.
By contrast, such talks seem much rarer from contemporary software designers. Why might that be? Or am I wrong—am I missing some incredible trove?
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My mom adopted a golden retriever puppy, so Shabu (age 2) and I have come to spend the week with them. I’ll keep this thread updated as the skirmishes unfold.
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Peripheral vision spontaneously prompts action.
If I need to fix a door, I’ll be reminded each time I see it. Digital task lists live in a dedicated app. I have no natural cause to look at that app regularly, so I need to establish a new habit to explicitly review my task list.
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The Scout Mindset (@juliagalef’s new book) sharply distills many key ideas from the rationalist world, but the framing is unusual and (I think) better! It presents motivated reasoning as rooted in important emotional functions which truth-seeking advocates must address/provide.
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This is a thoughtful new review of the “interactive explanation” milieu: distill.pub/2020/communicati…. I’m a friend of the format—I’ve written articles like this myself—but I worry it’s trapped in a limited framing, selling short the potential of computational representations.
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Among the most startling book reviews I've read.
A book review of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
This is probably the first book review you will read that has absolutely no spoilers and that you will appreciate equally whether you have read the book or not (at least if you read to the end).
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Weird internet communities are seeds from which much wonder grows! @slatestarcodex’s writing cultivates many favorite facets of SF culture. A NYT writer plans to reveal the pseudonymous author’s name despite his safety concerns, so SSC is now offline. Such harm—for what value?
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"Export considered harmful"
Because software rarely operate on "files in folders" anymore, "export" is increasingly the way software exposes data. But usually you don't want a dead snapshot; you want to "use this data elsewhere"—which requires repeatedly exporting & reconciling.
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I've been noodling on: what is my "field" anyway? (Well, it's a proto-field, if anything). I recently attended a conference with a bunch of Ink & Switch and unusual HCI people and felt a strong kinship there, even though our work seems quite different on its surface. What unites us?
* Invention work focused on something like the liberatory, augmentative original frame of personal computing: computers can transform what we can create, think, do
* Emphasis on Illich-style conviviality over an elite centralized locus of production and control.
* Emphasis on applied work which would often not count as research in academic HCI, but with decidedly more theoretical/conceptual care than most industry work.
* Emphasis on design, feeling, and expression that are not central to academic HCI
* Emphasis on creative conviction over market or academic advancement incentives.
I'm not sure if this is a useful or coherent category; just riffing a bit.
It's tempting to include something like "indie computing research", but I don't actually care about being independent for the sake of being independent. If there were an institution which I felt would support me in pursuing my creative and intellectual aims, that'd be great.
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It’s quite rare for software to offer both a real local file format and also substantial cloud/SaaS behavior (ie other than syncing). Usually it’s one or the other—if the cloud has active behavior, apps are thin clients which don’t expose an accessible on-disk format (eg Notion).
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Powerful tools for thought usually arise as a byproduct of real work in a field rather than "I have an idea for a tool!" (Hindu-Arabic numerals, microscopes, RenderMan, Mathematica). => People interested in tools must get into a context s.t. real work incites tool-work. Not easy!
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If tutors really do reliably produce two-sigma learning gains, then why aren't most top achievers the product of tutors? Yes, they're expensive, but perhaps "only" 2-3x private school; there are a lot of wealthy parents. Diminishing returns for high achievers?
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There are surprisingly few resources on designing and building good macOS Catalyst software. That's a shame, since for many business models it's likely the only viable path to a native desktop app. This new guide from @craftdocs is a great addition. craft.do/maccatalyst-guide
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One odd function of pomodoro timers is to viscerally demonstrate how little focused solo work is possible in a typical office environment. At Apple, 6 or 7 would be a very focused day! I felt guilty about this at first but then came to focus on using that time well.
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I did 1:1 study sessions with 14 people last week to test a prototype. Really startling variability: no two people had the same approach to math, to reading, to learning, to note-making, to memory, etc.
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Feeling awfully wistful about Twitter being mutilated more and more perversely. Most of the important new relationships, ideas, experiences of my past decade have come from Twitter, and I don't see an obvious path forward. A diaspora of incompatible platforms seems likeliest.
I mean, eventually a man runs out of friends. Elon isn't Trump. I don't think he has the same sort of approval rating floor where 40% of America always likes him. More likely? I think there's no floor.
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Can’t make a dev build of software I’ve written for my own device because Apple’s server is down.
This is a bad future; we must subvert it.
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Fun inversion from Thorndike (1921). The normal angle is: "Why are some people so much better at some things? What are the limits of expertise?" He reframes to: "Why do most people remain so mediocre at things they spend their whole lives doing?"
andymatuschak.org/files/pape… (p. 178)
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For a few years, I've had weekly 2-3hr readings for a course. It's a startling barometer: if I'd spent a while on X/YouTube/etc in the prior 48 hours, I'll want to distract myself every few minutes. But if I've been scrolling-free, it'll be easy to settle in for an unbroken hour!
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About a year ago, I started working independently from home. Being totally in control of my own time & environment really removed all excuses! If I'm not having a good day, it's no one's fault but mine. I found that a steady routine really helped.
Some things that worked for me:
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